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Message-ID: <20061121110717.GA9863@in.ibm.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:37:17 +0530
From: Suparna Bhattacharya <suparna@...ibm.com>
To: Avantika Mathur LTC <mathur@...ibm.com>
Cc: linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org, shaggy@...ibm.com
Subject: Re: Ext4 devel interlock meeting minutes (Nov. 17, 2006)
For this week's call, could we have a discussion on the API for
persistent preallocation ? Options suggested in the past have
included posix_fallocate, fadvise, fcntl/ioctl, ftruncate.
Regards
Suparna
On Fri, Nov 17, 2006 at 01:59:24PM -0800, Avantika Mathur LTC wrote:
> Sorry they are a little late! Here are minutes from the interlock call
> on Wednesday.
>
> Thanks,
> Avantika
> ----
>
> Ext4 Developer Interlock Call: 11/15/06 Minutes
>
> Attendees: Dave Kleikamp, Ted Ts'o, Jean-Pierre Dion, Valirie Climent,
> Jean-Noel Cordenner, Mingming Cao, Suparna Bhattacharya, Eric Sandeen,
> Avantika Mathur
>
> - WIKI: Decided that we need to maintain one Wiki for Ext4. Ted will
> request a new wiki on kernel.org.
>
> - Shaggy had sent out an Ext4 roadmap after the last call, but need to
> continue to plan when each feature will be stable and when the disk
> format can be freezed. This should be kept up to date on the Wiki.
>
> - Ted is reviewing extents patches to e2fsprogs. There have been many
> changes to mercurial in the past week.
>
> - Defrag Schemes: Detailed discussion of the different defrag schemes
> being discussed on the mailing list, and what requirements are needed
> for Ext4. A summary of this discussion is below:
>
>
> DEFRAG DISCUSSION
> =================
>
> (Ted and Eric, this is what I remembered from the discussion, please
> fill in any gaps or correct any mistakes in the summary.)
>
> Trying to establish a clear direction for defrag, there has been a lot
> of discussion on the mailing list.
> The issues discussed were:
>
> -- How the interface to the defrag should be implemented. Current ideas
> are using ioctls, system calls, or implementing as a filesystem. Using
> ioctls was the method generally favored by Ted and Eric in the discussion.
>
> -- Whether the implementation should be extent based or block based. Ted
> feels that this should be extent based, using indirect blocks if necessary
>
> -- Should the block allocation policy be driven by user space or kernel
> space?
>
> Prefer a user space driven policy, so that files that are accessed
> concurrently during system boot, can be put close together to speed up
> the boot process. In this design the user space interface can specify
> an inode and logical block sequence to be put in a certain block
> location; if the space is available, the kernel will copy data and inode
> pointers.
> The user space interface will access bitmaps to locate free space. It
> should also have the interface to specify a certain region to be
> reserved, and that region would be freed on the disk, so user space can
> move other files to that space.
>
> -- Implementation
>
> Ted believes the defrag should be implemented by specifying a region
> space for a file on disk, storing file data in page cache and copying
> the data from the page cache to the new physical blocks. Then changing
> the mappings from the logical blocks to these new physical blocks.
>
> Eric's approach is to identify the region on disk, generate a secondary
> inode for the file and allocate this space to the secondary inode. Then
> copy the data from the original file to the new blocks, and replace the
> inode. All file writes will need to be restricted during this process.
> Ted's concerns with this approach is possible inconsistencies in the
> journal if the system crashes during this process, and also the
> inability to defrag files while they are being written to.
>
>
>
> -
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--
Suparna Bhattacharya (suparna@...ibm.com)
Linux Technology Center
IBM Software Lab, India
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